Last year’s fight in Washington over "net neutrality" will probably go down as just an early skirmish in a much longer battle between the network operators and the internet services companies.
The next front: which side reaps the lion’s share of the money for serving up targetted advertising to internet users. This has been the preserve of companies like DoubleClick, whose cookies track behaviour on the Web and use this to serve up relevant advertising, but there’s no technical reason why the network operators shouldn’t insert themselves into the process. Using gear designed for "deep packet analysis" (the same equipment that makes censorship on the internet possible), they could easily "listen in" on the traffic flowing across their networks to develop a far more precise picture of an internet user’s behaviour than the one available to DoubleClick.
Internet companies don’t seem to realise what could hit them. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, issued this warning today at the Always On venture capital conference (see note below):
I don’t think people in the Valley believe this. I used to doubt it – but I’m 100 per cent convinced [the network companies] are going to do it, and they’re going to get away with it.
The implications for privacy seem huge. But according to this story in the Wall Street Journal, some smaller US telecoms companies are already trying out the idea.
